The Bob Burns Golf Company & Story (Reviews Coming Soon)
Written by It's not everyday that you encounter a smaller golf company that really puts out a quality product. And it's even more unusual to find a smaller golf company that has built an excellent relationship with it's customers. The Bob Burn's Golf Company does all of the above.
We cannot say enough positive things about our experiences with the Burns family. They focus on every detail and they truly produce quality products that are consistent with the best of the best in performance and technology. They also offer a more individual and personal experience that some of the larger golf equipment companies cannot provide. And they do it for a much more reasonable price.
This week will be posting several Bob Burns Golf equipment reviews, and we just wanted to start it all off with a little background on the owners and the company. Please continue reading to learn more.
Intro
With its headquarters (pictured above) located just north of Appleton, Wisconsin, Bob Burns Golf is a family owned and operated business founded in 1975 by PGA Master Professional and recognized teacher of the game, Bob Burns. The Golf Learning Center is committed to manufacturing and selling golf equipment that does not infringe on the patents or trademarks of other manufacturers. The company designs and manufactures its own lines of custom-made golf clubs, including its line of No Bananas Anti Slice golf equipment; but the company also sells refurbished clubs & sets of irons, in particular, that have been completely refinished, re-polished, re-shafted, and re-gripped. The company prides itself on year-round service to the golfing public, personalized lessons for both beginners and advanced players, and individualized attention to custom club-fitting, club-repair, and modification. Their pro shop features a wide variety of golf merchandise & clubs, of course, but also apparel, accessories, training aids, books, videos, and golf club components. Their teaching and club-fitting facilities and practices take advantage of the latest in swing-computer and launch-monitor analysis.
The Story
In its early years, Bob Burns Golf was a one-man operation dedicated, in part, to the repair, modification, and restoration of golf clubs but also to instruction and, most notably, perhaps, to the manufacture of custom-made clubs, including woods cut and handcrafted from unfinished blocks of persimmon or laminated maple. (Click "Continue Reading" below for more)
During the 1980’s, the company’s reputation grew steadily, and its founder was invited to offer courses and seminars on club-design, manufacture, and repair at the likes of Ferris State College, the Tommy Armour Golf Co. (then called the PGA Golf Co.), and the Ben Hogan Co. (then a subsidiary of American Machine Foundry or AMF). By the early 1990s, the company’s business had increased even more appreciably, as fewer and fewer golf-course shops offered services in club-repair and modification or custom club-fitting, and as increasing numbers of sporting goods stores concerned themselves solely with retail sales. As other club-making companies abandoned the production of traditional, wooden clubs, Bob Burns Golf was able to purchase from Wilson Sporting Goods many of the machines Wilson had used in making them. And even today’s in this era of mass-produced cast irons and metal woods’ Bob Burns Golf uses some of those machines in maintaining its original lines of business, in club-repair and refinishing, and by filling occasional orders for custom-made, traditional clubs from golfing aficionados around the world.
By the late 1990s, the PGA Master Professional and teacher had been joined by his two sons; and by 1999, the family had completed construction of its present headquarters with extensive outdoor facilities for teaching and practice (a crescent-shaped range with six target greens; a putting green; and a separate, bunkered green for learning and improving the short-game)’”and indoors, a full-service pro shop (with numerous models and sets of Bob Burns Custom Woods, Irons, Fairway Metals, Hybrids, Wedges, and Putters on display); an elaborate and complex workshop for club-making, restoration, modification, and repair; and an area for teaching and practicing in inclement weather (a space replete with hitting nets, swing computers, a launch monitor, and many teaching-aids, some of them conventional, others proprietary and ingeniously distinctive).
By the turn of the century, Bob Burns Golf was designing and manufacturing its own lines of metal woods and contemporaneously engineered irons, wedges, and putters. And very shortly, Bob Burns’ life-long interests in custom club-making and teaching would come together in the now famous No Bananas Drivers the result, in essence, of his sympathetic experiences with the incorrigible outside-in swings of so many of his students.
The success story of the No Bananas Drivers began on a snowy morning early in 2005, when Mike Stachura, the equipment editor of Golf Digest, called Bob to ask if he would be interested in having the No Bananas Drivers tested against other anti-slice and draw-bias drivers at the Digest’s laboratories in San Diego. “Do you think your clubs are up to the test?” Stachura asked. Bob replied, “Yes, of course”; and immediately shipped off a dozen drivers for testing.
When the results of those tests were published in the June, 2005 issue of Golf Digest, they set off what would soon become a worldwide media-buzz. The Bob Burns No Bananas Drivers had proven best at reducing slices. Golf Digest called them “The Ultimate Fix.” Within months, other major publications were requesting one or another model of the No Bananas Driver for product testing. Fairways and Greens Magazine called it ‘the real deal’; Luxury Golf and Travel, ‘A Dynamite Driver.’ Since 2005, it and other clubs in the No Bananas line have been featured in Golf Illustrated, PGA Tour Partners, Avid Golfer, Golf World, Golfing Magazine, Golf Range Magazine, and Florida Golf Magazine. In fairly short order, the buzz occasioned by the No Bananas Driver brought to Bob Burns Golf over twenty accounts worldwide, including those with GolfSmith, the world’s largest online golf retailer, and with the upscale specialty catalogue, Herrington.
In 2006 and early 2007, the company completed its No Bananas line of clubs and accessories which now includes four sizes of drivers (in seven models), as well as weight-adjustable fairway metals, irons, and hybrid clubs.
